In a Signal conversation with his wife and brother, Hegseth shared information prior to the Yemeni strikes.
Courtney Kube, Raquel Coronell Uribe, and" Gordon Lubold" According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used his personal phone to send information about U.S. military operations in Yemen to a 13-person Signal group chat, including his wife and brother. According to sources, he did so after an aide had cautioned him not to share sensitive information on an unsecure communications system prior to the Yemen operation. The fact that Hegseth shared details of strikes in Yemen in a separate Signal conversation with high-ranking administration officials was made public about a month ago. Inadvertently, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief was added to that chain. "The New York Times"first reported the second Signal chat's existence. The Times referred to four anonymous sources. According to the Times, some of them said that some of the information Hegseth shared in the second chat, like the flight schedule for the FA-18 planes being used, was similar to what the editor of The Atlantic had reported in the Signal chat. NBC News received confirmation from one source. The Defense Department's chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, denied that Hegseth had shared classified information. He stated on X, "There was no classified information in any Signal chat." A White House deputy press secretary named Anna Kelly minimized the significance of the second group discussion. She stated in a statement, "The fact that no classified information was shared cannot be changed no matter how many times the legacy media tries to resurrect the same non-story." According to the two sources, the second Signal group chat included thirteen individuals but did not include any additional Cabinet-level officials. According to the two sources, the attendees included Joe Kasper, Hegseth's chief of staff; Darin Selnick, Hegseth's deputy chief of staff; Eric Geressy, a retired Army sergeant major and Hegseth adviser; Tim Parlatore, Hegseth's legal adviser and a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General's Corps; Hegseth's brother Phil, senior adviser to Hegseth for the Department of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly added to a Signal conversation in March with a number of leaders in national security. During the conversation, Hegseth discussed operational plans for striking military targets in Yemen before they happened. The inspector general of the Defense Department is currently conducting an investigation into that conversation. According to the two sources, Hegseth utilized his personal phone rather than his official one in both instances. A month ago, it was made public that Hegseth's wife, a former Fox News producer, had been to important meetings with British and NATO leaders at the Defense Department. Jennifer Hegseth is not a Pentagon employee.
